Pages

Saturday, July 07, 2012

This promo sought to stoke the raging pinball community of 1997 America on Medieval Madness, a game that Williams Pinball hope would push pinball machines to the forefront of arcade gaming. (“It could conceivably be a game that resurrects this industry,” says pinball wizard Steve Kordeck at around the 3:00 mark.) Obviously, it didn’t. You may have noticed there are considerably fewer arcades around nowadays — video game or pinball.

However, this is not a post focusing on the irony of a “next big thing” that turns out to be another little whatever. No, the nugget here is Tina Fey, whom you may have heard is a rapper now. Back in 1997, Fey and 30 Rock bud Scott “Hornberger” Adsit lent their voices to this pinball game — you know, all the color commentary, taunts and cheers you get when you make the ball do something, and of course I’m guessing because I can’t actually remember ever playing pinball. This would be Tina Fey immediately before she began writing at Saturday Night Live and somewhat less immediately before she got all “camera friendly.” Now, the cast actually features two actresses, so I can be sure whether Tina Fey is the one we hear right at 2:16, but ten years of listening to her have made me feel pretty confident that I tell it’s Tina doing the valley girl accent.

Here, I queued it up:

See? And now we all feel less bad about the insulting jobs we have, because we — like Tina — will one day get to look back and refer to them as our “pre-fame jobs.”